EGU2020-7720, updated on 12 Jun 2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7720
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Geophysical validation of two years of Sentinel-5p tropical tropospheric ozone columns

Daan Hubert1, Tijl Verhoelst1, Steven Compernolle1, Arno Keppens1, José Granville1, Jean-Christopher Lambert1, Klaus-Peter Heue2, Diego Loyola2, Kai-Uwe Eichmann3, Mark Weber3, Anne M. Thompson4, Marc Allaart5, Ankie Piters5, Bryan J. Johnson6, Henry B. Selkirk4,8, Holger Vömel7, Francisco R. da Silva9, Maznorizan Mohamad10, Christian Félix11, and René Stübi11
Daan Hubert et al.
  • 1Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB), Brussels, Belgium (daan.hubert@aeronomie.be)
  • 2DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany
  • 3IUP Bremen, Bremen, Germany
  • 4NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, USA
  • 5KNMI, De Bilt, The Netherlands
  • 6NOAA ESRL/GMD, Boulder, CO, USA
  • 7Earth Observing Laboratory, NCAR, Boulder, CO, USA
  • 8University Space Research Associates, Greenbelt, MD, USA
  • 9Brazilian Institute of Space Research, Laboratory of Environmental and Tropical Variables, Natal, Brazil
  • 10Malaysian Meteorological Department, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
  • 11MeteoSwiss Aerological Station Payerne, Payerne, Switzerland

Tropospheric ozone damages ecosystems and causes human health problems. The high spatial and temporal variability of ozone concentrations in the troposphere challenges global observing systems to monitor ozone at all relevant scales. TROPOMI is a nadir-viewing UV-Vis-NIR-SWIR sensor that combines a high spatial resolution, a large swath width and the spectral measurement characteristics required to deliver trace gas data records at unprecedented detail. The first tropospheric data product was publicly released in Fall 2018, a year after launch on the Sentinel-5p platform (S5p). It is based on the convective-cloud differential technique (CCD) to infer 0.5°x1° resolved daily maps of 3-day moving mean values of the tropospheric ozone column (surface to 270 hPa) between 20°S and 20°N in clear-sky conditions. This makes it the highest resolved tropospheric ozone data set currently available for the tropical belt. About two years of data have been collected since the end of the commissioning phase in April 2018.

We present an assessment of the quality of the Sentinel-5p TROPOMI convective-cloud differential tropospheric ozone column data products (O3_TCL OFFL v01.01.05-01.01.07), carried out within the context of ESA’s Sentinel-5p Mission Performance Center (MPC) and the S5PVT AO project CHEOPS-5p. Our assessment of the first two years of TROPOMI data is based on comparisons with (a) quality-assured co-located in-situ measurements by the SHADOZ ozonesonde network, and, (b) satellite data by the GOME-2 and OMI sensors. These well-characterized observational data records serve as references to evaluate the bias and the dispersion of S5p data, and their dependence on influence quantities. Additional visual inspections of the S5p tropospheric ozone maps unveiled non-geophysical structures introduced by the sampling pattern of sensor and clouds. We conclude by assessing the compliance of S5p tropospheric ozone data with respect to mission and user requirements for key data applications.

How to cite: Hubert, D., Verhoelst, T., Compernolle, S., Keppens, A., Granville, J., Lambert, J.-C., Heue, K.-P., Loyola, D., Eichmann, K.-U., Weber, M., Thompson, A. M., Allaart, M., Piters, A., Johnson, B. J., Selkirk, H. B., Vömel, H., da Silva, F. R., Mohamad, M., Félix, C., and Stübi, R.: Geophysical validation of two years of Sentinel-5p tropical tropospheric ozone columns, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-7720, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7720, 2020